Special Feature

This article is based on a research on identifying different stakeholders’ concerns for system architecture and design. It explores if the different stakeholders’ need for system architecture information is related to their concerns. It addresses two important research questions on system architecture descriptions, namely, 1) Do all stakeholders have different needs for information on system architecture concerns? and 2) How much of similarities and differences exist between the stakeholders’ need for such information. The authors analyze if the system architecture information needs of the stakeholders’ can be addressed by providing different views to different stakeholders. Based on the findings of their research, the authors propose a two-view architecture framework, Summary view and In-Depth view, which can help development projects that are required to generate stakeholder specific architecture views. The findings of the study suggest that the information needs of different groups of stakeholders for system architecture are driven by their own need to get their tasks of system realization completed.

Two years ago, some of my friends pressed me intensely to be more definitive about the Framework concepts. Even though, I had written “The Book,” they were specifically asking me for definitions of the entities that comprise the meta model of Row 2 of the Enterprise Framework. It has taken me and a team of dedicated folks two years, however we have progressed far beyond the original requirement. We have produced definitions, not only of the meta entities of Row 2 of the Enterprise Framework, but also we have dictionary definitions of the meta entities of Row 1, Row 2, Row 3, Row 4, Row 5 and Row 6 of the Enterprise Framework plus dictionary definitions for the Product Framework (where I learned about the Framework classification in the first place), for the Profession Framework (that I used to call the I/S Framework, the “meta Framework” relative to the Enterprise Framework) and for the Zachman Classification Framework (the Framework classification for all Frameworks). This work is particularly significant at this point in time for several reasons.